


Walk a mile in someone's shoes...

by AxZi



Category: Katekyou Hitman Reborn!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, For I dunno a more interesting story I guess?, Gen, Mystery, One-Shot, Origin Story, Point of divergence: during the Mukuro Tsuna fight, Possession, beginning of the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-26
Updated: 2017-02-26
Packaged: 2018-09-27 02:04:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9945497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AxZi/pseuds/AxZi
Summary: "Whoops. My hand slipped."Those were the words that dawned on a typically sweltering hot Japanese mid-afternoon. Those were the words which established the beginning of the end.





	

"Whoops. My hand slipped."

 

Those were the words that dawned on a typically sweltering hot Japanese mid-afternoon. Those were the words which established the beginning of the end. 

 

Tsuna made a choked noise. His shaking hand reached for the position just next to his liver, and his fingers came back dotted in blood. The spike hadn't even gone in deep. If only even the slightest nick of the trident didn't mean defeat. 

 

From his spot in the corner supervising, Reborn was shaking too. Shaking because this had only supposed to have been a learning experience. A way of hardening the soft centre of sympathy inside his student's heart. How had it gotten this way? If only Mukuro... From the corner of his eye, he spotted his chameleon just getting out of his trance. Right, that's right, he had to kill--

 

"Do you really want to do this?" A woman's voice stopped him. He looked down to see the battered form of his self proclaimed girlfriend holding onto his foot. In her right eye, the character of human that also coloured their enemy's eye stared back at him. The boy, Mukuro, could control several bodies. He gnashed his teeth behind the safety of his pursed lips. 

 

"Trying to kill me would mean giving up. It means being directly responsible for the death of the heir of a great man's mafia organisation, and it would mean the death of you and everything you hold dear." 

 

"Dame-Tsuna wasn't just--"

 

Sibilant chuckling slipped past the meat puppet's lips. "He still hates that, you know? The invalidation everyone does to him every time they use that nickname. The knowledge that he's disappointed so many people. And you would use it here, on his death bed?" He spread his arms wide from the floor, letting go of Reborn's calf. "He's still in there right now, he can hear everything you say." 

 

Despite himself, the tutor shot a look at the slumped form of his student. He sat crouched motionlessly in the centre of the room, making that same grasping expression. He thought he could see hurt, peaking out of the centre of his student's glazed brown eyes. 

 

...It was probably just a lie meant to unbalance him. His student was made out of sterner stuff than that. 

* * *

 

Inside Tsuna's mind, a war was ongoing. A war of attrition, where all his worst moment in life (and he had plenty of them) were shoved into his face, high quality, cinematic style. He underwent every insult lobbed at him, every put down he'd ever experienced. He remembered his mother calling him useless. He remembered the exact moment she'd given up on him. And then to have even his teacher, when he needed him most to have faith in him and trust he wouldn't let him down, call him useless? 

 

He just couldn't deal with it anymore. 

 

Water splashed within the murky depths of his already submerged mind, and he sat there on the sand banks and hiked his legs up to his chest. Water streamed down from his face, feeling distinctly salty. Tsuna swallowed the brick in his throat. 

 

It hurt. He had to admit it to himself. It _hurt._ It hurt. He was _hurt._

 

Someone made a sympathetic noise behind him. Mukuro. Tsuna immediately whipped his head back, met with the sight of his nemesis sitting sprawled out over the sand, allowing the individual grains to run down his fingers. His blue haircut looked washed out in the under the water atmosphere, giving his skin an even more guelish, corpse-like tint. 

 

All Tsuna could do for a moment was stair, before he shot to his feet and was about to start running. The hand, Mukuro's hand, on his shoulder stopped him. "I'm sorry about what you had to go through," He said, the boy's lips at his ear. "You're an innocent bystander in this, I understand that now."

 

Tsuna slapped away the hand, but as he did so he incidentally caught eyes with the man and.... he...saw....

 

Flashes of needles and tubes, stretching and invasively entering ligaments. His own blood being taken away from him, things being done to it, and then stuffed back in again. His eye as they poured a solution in that burned like liquid acid, and the dissacociating that accompied him, seeing himself lying on the metal slab they used for experimentation struggling against his restraints, as they broke every bone in his body and put him back together again, all seemingly just because they _could._ Every moment in which he was forced to hurt others to not be hurt, feeling less human and more like an animal in the process of domestication. 

 

The humiliation he had suffered at the mafia's hands had been immense, and Tsuna couldn't help but **sympathise.  
**

And that was where he truly lost.

* * *

 

It is easy identifying with a man once you've walked in his shoes. But beyond even that, to the extent of becoming that man....to truly see through his eyes, to experience his every rise and fall, and to easily be able to slot it in with your own experience of the world, that is different. Something....  .....more....

 

Rokudo Mukuro died that day and some of his followers followed by way of committing suicide, or being killed by an wrathful tutor who's student had been taken. The Vindice, the mafia's law enforcement, did arrive but late, when everything was already done. Since they had nothing to take back to the prison with them, they withdrew. 

 

Tsuna looked out of the window of the car his tutor had sorted for them, his thoughts his own. 

 

But one thing was true, and that's that Rokudo Mukuro as he had once been had died that day. But so did Tsuna. Tsuna had been irrevocably _changed_ by the encounter, though nobody else but him knew in what way. 

 

Tsuna looked out of the mirror, and wondered. In the tinted reflection staring back at him, he could almost see a purple haze dancing hypnotically in the outlines of his eye. 

 

He settled back down again, and the humming of the engine beneath him masked his chocked sigh. 

* * *

 

 

 


End file.
